Kevin Drew is clearly in his element. It's a Wednesday in June, and the stylishly scruffy frontman of the band Broken Social Scene is surrounded by a few hundred fans who traveled to a small club at the outermost edge of Brooklyn to see the group play an unannounced show. Sympathetic and pleasantly soused, the crowd laughs knowingly when Drew apologizes for a somewhat sloppy rendition of "Fire Eye'd Boy." "It's a casual set tonight, folks," he says. Everyone falls silent when he adds, "It's gonna be a whole lot tighter tomorrow night for the Letterman show."

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By the humble standards of indie rock, Broken Social Scene – a Toronto collective with a fluctuating lineup of more than a dozen members that includes two trumpet players and a trombonist – has made it. The group's albums have sold more than 275,000 copies in North America, and after appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman the band will go on to play the huge Lollapalooza festival in Chicago. What's more impressive about this success is that Broken Social Scene creates unhurried, ethereal music that has never been played on a Clear Channel radio station, cannot provide the soundtrack to a TRL video, and will probably never land it on the cover of Rolling Stone.

It's hard to pinpoint a single factor responsible for Broken Social Scene's rise. The band's talent has certainly helped, as has a prolonged slump in major-label rock that has sent frustrated listeners scrambling for anything new and nonconformist. But the group also owes a lot to a backhanded rave from an online music fanzine called Pitchfork.

Ryan Schreiber, the site's editor in chief, reviewed Broken Social Scene's US debut album, You Forgot It in People, in 2003. He began by lamenting the fact that he was receiving more promotional CDs than he could possibly write about or even listen to, and he acknowledged that he had plucked this record from the slush pile at random. He chastised the group for its gloomy packaging and liner notes ("How could they not be the most unimaginative, bleak, whiny emo bastards in the whole pile?"). Then he conceded that he'd been listening to the record obsessively for months. It "explodes," he wrote, "with song after song of endlessly replayable, perfect pop." Schreiber awarded it a score of 9.2 points out of a possible 10. An indie rock star was born.

"That's when the phone calls started coming in," Drew says. "The next tour we went on, we suddenly found ourselves selling out venues. Everyone was coming up to us, saying, 'We heard about you from Pitchfork.' It basically opened the door for us. It gave us an audience."

Pitchfork, meanwhile, was becoming famous in its own right. As Schreiber and his tiny staff built a repository of defiantly passionate and frustratingly capricious reviews, they were insinuating themselves into the grand tradition of rock criticism, joining the ranks of imperious and opinionated writers who could, with a single phrase, turn readers on to an exciting new performer (recall Jon Landau's 1974 pronouncement in the Real Paper: "I saw rock & roll's future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen") or compel them to reassess the work of an established master (see Greil Marcus' take on Bob Dylan's album Self Portrait: "What is this shit?"). Pitchfork has appropriated the aura of integrity and authenticity that made such pronouncements credible, even definitive, to fans.

Though the music industry has seen drastic changes in recent years, what has remained constant is the fact that most listeners still find their music with the assistance of a filter: a reliable source that sifts through millions of tracks to help them choose what they do (and don't) want to hear. The filters we traditionally depended on – music magazines, radio stations, music video channels, even the recommendations of a trusted record store clerk – have diminished in influence enough to give a player like Pitchfork room to operate. Pitchfork is a small site: The traffic it draws is too tiny to be measured by Nielsen//NetRatings. But like the indie bands that are its lifeblood, Pitchfork has found its own way to thrive in an industry that is slowly being niched to death: It influences those who influence others.

I should probably mention that Pitchfork also helped put me out of a job. From 2002 until just recently, I was an editor at Spin, a magazine that was itself once positioned as a much-needed substitute for the entrenched rock journalism establishment. Spin's influence peaked in the early '90s, when alt-rock acts like Nirvana started going multiplatinum. But as that scene receded, the magazine struggled to find its identity: In one incarnation, it would sing the praises of nü-metalheads like Korn and Limp Bizkit; in the next, it would pin its hopes on garage-rock revivalists like the Strokes and the White Stripes. As Pitchfork's influence grew, we consulted the site as both a resource and a measuring stick – if it was lavishing attention on a new band, we at least had to ask ourselves why we weren't doing the same: By then, our value as a trustworthy and consistent filter had waned.

The trouble we had at Spin was that although there were still new and emerging indie-rock acts worth getting excited about, none would ever be big enough to sell a magazine that had to reach half a million consumers every month just to stay alive. But Pitchfork thrives in this new climate – it took the model and the voice of a print publication to the Internet, where it could cultivate a small but influential readership and write about music in any form and at any length it wanted. It also rediscovered that the secret to tastemaking is taste: Through the bands that it chose to focus on and the artists it ignored – and, yes, its utterly unscientific but geekily precise 10-point album-rating scale – the site was speaking directly to listeners no longer served by traditional media outlets.

At any given moment, Pitchfork's homepage provides an instantaneous read on a broad swath of pop-music happenings, with band interviews, tour dates, and a frequently updated news feed. But what immediately catches a reader's eye is the profusion of adjectives and adverbs that don't always mean exactly what they say but are passionately trying to say something: The debut CD from the Brooklyn trio Au Revoir Simone is described as "musically fanciful and lyrically Pollyannaish," while the latest release from the avant-garde band TV on the Radio, we are told, has "abstract and electronic textures," and a new album from the British group Keane is excoriated for its "portentous clichés."